The following Australian provisional patent applications are hereby incorporated by cross-reference. For the purposes of location and identification, U.S. patent applications identified by their U.S. patent application serial numbers (USSN) are listed alongside the Australian applications from which the U.S. patent applications claim the right of priority.
Not applicable.
The present invention relates to the manufacture of ink jet printheads and, in particular, discloses a method of manufacture of an ink jet printhead.
Many ink jet printing mechanisms are known. Unfortunately, in mass production techniques, the production of ink jet printheads is quite difficult. For example, often, the orifice or nozzle plate is constructed separately from the ink supply and ink ejection mechanism and bonded to the mechanism at a later stage (Hewlett-Packard Journal, Vol. 36 no 5, pp33-37 (1985)). The separate material processing steps required in handling such precision devices often add a substantial expense to manufacturing.
Additionally, side shooting ink jet technologies (U.S. Pat. No. 4,899,181) are often used but again, this limits the amount of mass production throughput given any particular capital investment.
Additionally, more esoteric techniques are also often utilized. These can include electroforming of nickel (Hewlett-Packard Journal, Vol. 36 no 5, pp33-37 (1985)), electro-discharge machining, laser ablation (U.S. Pat. No. 5,208,604), micro-punching, etc.
The utilization of the above techniques is likely to add substantial expense to the mass production of ink jet printheads and therefore add substantially to their final cost.
It would therefore be desirable if an efficient system for the mass production of ink jet printheads could be developed.
In accordance with a first aspect of the present invention, there is provided a method of manufacturing an ink jet printhead having a thermoelastic bend actuator using polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) and corrugated copper wherein an array of nozzles are formed on a substrate utilizing planar monolithic deposition, lithographic and etching processes. Preferably, multiple ink jet printheads are formed simultaneously on a single planar substrate such as a silicon wafer.
The printheads can be formed utilizing standard vlsi/ulsi processing and can include integrated drive electronics formed on the same substrate. The drive electronics are preferably of a CMOS type. In the final construction, ink can be ejected from the substrate substantially normal to the surface of the substrate.